At Glossy’s Beauty & Wellness Leaders Dinner, hosted in partnership with Recharge at Nobu Malibu on October 24, leaders from across both industries convened to discuss the biggest challenges they’re facing and effective strategies for navigating them.
One of the biggest topics of the night was TikTok, which is widely known for its unpredictable algorithm that can send a brand to the height of virality. Multiple leaders in attendance spoke highly of the potential gains to be made from advertising on TikTok, but lamented that it can be impossible to tell what strategies will work best on the platform.
“Paid ads aren’t always the way on TikTok,” one attendee said. “Organic is usually the best driver, and it’s where we’ve seen the most growth. We spend a lot of money on our organic TikTok content and through working with creators, but it’s still kind of a headscratcher of what will work.”
Another attendee said that, while he initially launched his brand on TikTok by working 28 different creators, the return on investment was uneven. He said he was advised by representatives from TikTok that paid ads on the platform may not see a “meaningful return on investment” unless you pay somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000.
“We initially made a big investment in TikTok,” the executive said. “TikTok is all about virality, so the key is to find the right creators to partner with and hope that maybe one out of every 10 partnerships is going to hit. And when you’re spending $10,000 per creator, it’s hard to identify pure ROI. You have to look at their clickthrough rates and engagement and calculate if it’s worth it.”
One leader even mentioned paying top dollar for sponsored posts from both Charli and Dixie D’Amelio, TikTok superstars, that barely moved the needle on sales.
Instead, multiple leaders said the best solution they’ve found for working with TikTok is mass gifting and seeding of products to a wide variety of creators. It’s cheaper than paid ads and sponsored posts and, given the mercurial nature of what goes viral on TikTok, spreading products out to a large number of creators increases the chances that something will take off on its own.
The final TikTok topic of the night was TikTok Shop, the newly launched commerce channel that many brands are just now starting to test. At least one leader at the Glossy event was bullish on the potential for TikTok Shop.
“It’s such an amazing new channel,” the leader said. “It makes it very easy to shop. Native purchasing and not having to navigate between platforms is so important for ease of use. We are running ads directing people to the TikTok Shop and, so far, our TikTok Shop ads are doing much better than our regular TikTok ads.”
